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The Ecquire Blog

Work productivity tips and CRM hacks for the leading enterprise

March 26, 2012

Turn Google Docs into a Lightweight CRM in 5 Easy Steps

If you’re a small business entrepreneur, finding and choosing a CRM system is a time-consuming and expensive task. You could spend hours learning about different products, features, hosted vs cloud, SaaS vs ASP, and the list goes on. When your team is small, the best thing would be to find a simple solution that works, won’t take up too much of your time, and works with your existing tools.

Google Docs does exactly that. We’ve written a guide to show you how to turn your Google Docs into a fully functional CRM that integrates with your Gmail, provides team collaboration, and best of all, is free.

Step 1. Sign up for a Google Account

Get yourself a Google account which will include Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and plenty more. Also, grab the Chrome browser if you don’t have it already.

Step 2. Get Ecquire from the Chrome Web Store.

Step 3. Connect a Google Docs spreadsheet to Use with Ecquire.

Once you add Ecquire to Chrome, you’ll be automatically prompted to select the CRM you want to use. Select Google Docs. Be sure to disregard the shameless plug here that we connect to other CRMs as well like Mailchimp for example.

Select Google Docs or others as well.

Step 4. Customize columns in the spreadsheet with information to your liking: demographic information, source, and lead stage.

Let Ecquire automatically create a spreadsheet with already defined columns. You can also customize columns for specific information that your users may need. For example, the sales team will need to know information on where in the funnel the contact is, how qualified of a lead, and what the next steps are.

After you send your email you’ll see this over the Ecquire Icon in your Chrome URL bar… Click that $*%^

Here is the Ecquire Drawer where you can see all the information we’ve grabbed for you and what you’re about to submit to your CRM.

Add notes if you want or any other fields before submitting to your spreadsheet….

After you hit submit, Ecquire will show you a direct link to the entry in your Spreadsheet CRM to view…

See it in Google Docs via easy to see link.

Here’s what it looks like in the spreadsheet….

Bam!

That’s it. Ecquire gives you 15 credits each month for imports and updates to your CRM. Unlimited imports and updates are available to our subscribers. For more information about our premium service, contact us at support@ecquire.com.

Hey Justin, right now, we don’t have an automatic way to enter the date into the spreadsheet. Reason being that Google Docs doesn’t have a formula to enter the date when the contact was entered. You would have to create a special formula for that. However, we did make it a bit easier as you could at least manually enter in the date while you’re adding the contact.

I downloaded Ecquire and excited about using it. However, I don’t see a way to use connect the contact information with Google calendar to create reminders and followups to clients. Am I missing something or is there another app I should use with this?

For small business owners and one person sales teams that do not need complex software like CRM to manage their business activities and contacts, using a free online tool like One Sheet CRM (http://www.onesheetcrm.com/index.html) would be perfect. The pre-formatted Google Spreadsheet makes it easy for you manage your contacts and track your sales performance.